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Comment by dmlorenzetti | Hacker News Reader

How about useful search?

Currently, you can't direct searches within nested folders. You either search all messages, or search within one folder/label. So for example, I have e-mails grouped by project, and within big projects there are sub-labels:

  project1/testing
  project1/doc
  project1/proposals
  ...
  project2/testing
  ...

If I search in "project1", it doesn't look in any of those sub-folders.

Search also could use a grep-like capability. The "advanced search" options are a bit of a joke, especially coming from a company that cut its teeth on search.

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You can search nested labels. If you go into a sub label you should see the search box auto-populate with that label (including the nested on).

For example I have a nested label "Invites" in the label "Calendar" (Calendar/Invites). Searching "label:calendar-invites blah" searches for "blah" inside the nested label.

I agree, you can construct a pretty flexible search system with the existing Gmail implementation. (disclosure: I work at a small startup trying to address email search and archive organization). How many rules do you have set up to achieve your (arguably very reasonable) workflow?

However, to perform a successful search with specific constraints, you must either:

1) Remember a keyword

2) Have a label for the particular constraint you want to use

Our little startup, SolNovus (http://solnovus.com), has been investigating how to make a couple power-user functions like this more accessible. Our priorities are:

1) Fuzzy topic search: make keywords more forgiving

2) Analysis and visualization of email graph: sift through related threads and see the impact of search constraints, represent scale and organization with more than an inbox counter

I know you can search within Calendar/Invites.

The issue arises if you know the message you want is somewhere under Calendar, but you're not sure whether it's in Calendar/Invites or Calendar/Rejected or Calendar/DateNotSetYet. As far as I know, it's not possible to search them all at once, just by searching under the tag Calendar.

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